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It’s funny, how a place that’s seemed too big and empty ever since the day she set foot in it instantly feels cramped the second Ben ducks into the old Lars homestead with her.
He observes the place with wary eyes and Rey allows him to, standing silently by his side as his gaze lingers on shadowed corners as if they might be hiding something.
When no ghosts appear, she watches the way he slowly lets the tension in his frame melt away with a shaky inhale, the way he slowly closes his eyes as dry desert air fills his lungs.
And then Ben turns to her, takes her hand, and allows her to lead him deeper into their temporary home.
“Skywalk… Luke never talked about this place,” he murmurs as they enter the kitchen and stare at the table where Luke and Leia had first hinted at the possibility of her reunion with Ben. It’s been less than a week, but that day – every single day Rey had been forced to spend without him, really – already feels like it was from a lifetime ago, like it was a bad dream that grows more distant and faded with each waking moment.
That’s not to say that this new reality doesn’t feel like a dream in its own way, but every time she fears it’s too good to be true, having Ben back and alive and with her, his hand is never too far from her own, never out of reach for a grounding touch or reassuring squeeze.
Only this time, Ben’s the one in need of reassurance, of comfort, as they wander through his uncle’s boyhood home. “I asked him about it once, when I was young,” he tells her as they leave the kitchen and enter a short hallway of closed doors. “At some point I’d realized that he never seemed to know the stories my mother would tell me about her people and her family and her home, and even then I could tell something just didn’t add up.”
He has a lot to say, now that he finally has the chance to, now that someone’s willing to listen.
Rey thinks she could listen to him talk until the suns burn out.
Ben’s eyes meet hers for the first time since they walked in. “So I asked him about it eventually, about why he and my mom didn’t have the same childhood stories, and then I asked him why he never told me any of his childhood stories.”
“What…” Her voice falters at the sight of him dwarfing the hallway, at the sight of him here in this place where she’d desperately imagined his ghost so many times. Rey clears her throat and tries again. “What did he say?”
She might never get used to the sight of Ben Solo shrugging. “That there was nothing to tell, that his life didn’t start until the day he met his friends and family.”
Rey has always known, somewhere in the back of her mind, that she and Luke share more in common than just an affinity for the Force. This, though… this might be their biggest common thread of all.
“I know exactly how that feels,” she tells Ben with a little squeeze of his hand, and for the briefest of moments the space between them seems to blur into a lush green forest.
His smile catches her off guard just as much as his shrug did, but Rey revels in the knowledge that she’ll have the rest of their lives to grow used to the sight, to cherish it each and every day.
They stand there in the cramped hallway for the longest time, just smiling at each other, and it’s okay because there’s time for that now, there’s all the time in the galaxy.
Still – eventually she snaps out of it, and Ben clears his throat, and Rey tugs him a few steps down the hall until they come to the smallest of the three doors. “It’s, um, it’s not much, but I just didn’t feel right taking the other two rooms.”
After all, it’s one thing to live in the house of ghosts, but another thing entirely to sleep in their beds.
“And like I said, we won’t be here for long,” she hurries to assure Ben, having spent the ride from Mos Eisley picking up on his intense discomfort at being in the desert, in this desert. “Just until we figure out what’s next. Though you’d be surprised, really, at how much easier said than done that is.”
She would know, since it had taken her a whole month to figure out a grand total of nothing. If the twins hadn’t intervened to push her in the right direction, Rey worries she would probably still be hard at work turning the Lars kitchen into a garden, worries she would have escaped the sands of Jakku only to be buried alive by the sands of Tatooine.
With their bond stronger than ever, Ben instantly picks up on her thoughts, her fears. He gives her hand a squeeze before he lets go, curves one warm hand around her cheek and waits for her to lean into his touch before he kisses her forehead.
When she closes her eyes, Rey can almost see where he touches her, visualize the press of his lips on her skin as a bright, blinding light that chases away all of her darkest fears, all of the cold paths she would have walked down without him. And in their place, there’s only the blank slate that awaits them, a galaxy’s worth of potential futures for them to pick from together.
“Together,” Ben reminds her, and the promise in his voice gives her the strength to shake off all of the what-ifs and maybes that still haunt her even now, to focus instead on the fact that he’s here and alive and– and she’s about to show him her room, their room from now on until the day they leave.
“Together,” Rey nods, and opens her door before Ben can pick up on her new train of thought.
It’s not much, just as she’d told him. The Lars family had probably used it as a storage room of some kind, given that the place had been filled with dusty boxes and half-filled shelves when Rey first stumbled upon it. She hasn’t made many changes to the space, save for the addition of a bedroll and…
Of course Ben sees them immediately.
“Rey,” he moans in pain, and falls to his knees before the small set of scratch marks low on the wall in front of them, each tally carved into the wall at the end of every day in place of the good night she longed to whisper against his lips.
Through the fog of grief and guilt in his mind, she picks up on a single, clear, insistent question: why?
Because Ben knows, of course he knows, about the original set of marks she’d kept, about what they’d meant to her and for her, how they’d been her way of deluding herself and trapping herself in the past.
These, though… these hadn’t been about deluding herself at all; that had never been an option, not with the wound of his loss a bleeding, throbbing thing that refused to scab over no matter how many days had passed.
Rey kneels down next to him, close enough to press the length of their arms together; the contact grounds her in the present as she relives the past. “After…”
After Exegol. After the end of the war. After the end of him and them and the only future she’d ever found worth fighting for–
“After, everything just… it all blurred together,” Rey whispers, reaching out with one hand to trace the first scratch. “One day I woke up and realized I couldn’t tell how many days it’d been since, and that– that was almost as bad as…”
A sob pushes its way past her lips unbidden, and her shoulders start shaking hard enough for Ben to draw her into his arms, to hold her still and soothe her.
She presses her face into his neck, feels his breath puffing against her forehead. “Everyone said it would get better with time, said someday it wouldn’t hurt anymore, and somehow that just made me feel worse. I didn’t want it to stop hurting, I didn’t want to live in a world where it was okay that you were gone, where it didn’t hurt not to have you with me.”
Ben cups her cheek and gently tilts her head back, guides her to meet his eye. “Rey, I never wanted that for you. I never want you to be in pain.”
“And I never want to wake up one morning and not feel you anymore, even if the only thing left of you is the pain,” she counters, her words adamant even as her voice falters.
It makes no sense, she knows, but if the tables were turned, if Ben knew what it felt like to have half of his soul gone, to have a hole in his heart, to–
But I do, he reminds her, even though he instantly regrets it and the flood of memories those words call upon, the pain and panic he’d felt dragging himself up from the pit only to find her lifeless body, the sheer dread that had filled his entire being–
“You gave your life for me so you wouldn’t have to live in a world without me,” Rey murmurs, even though she knows that’s far from the whole truth of the matter, and Ben… Ben doesn’t deny it, can’t deny it with his memory of that moment still so fresh in their minds. Bringing her back to life had simultaneously been the most selfish and selfless thing he had ever done in his life, and she doesn’t hold it against him, can’t begrudge him what he considers the best decision of his life even if it had cost him his life, but…
“I didn’t get that choice. The only way I could keep you was… was like this,” Rey says, pointing at the marks with a shaking hand.
Through tear-stained vision, she watches Ben’s hand join hers, watches him lace their fingers together and bring their joined hands to touch the tangible evidence of their separation.
Ben guides them to the last mark, the one she’d scratched the night before leaving for Ahch-To.
“That,” he tells her, voice thick with tears even as it rings with determination, “is the last time you will ever feel alone, Rey. I swear.”
He’s made her that promise once before – in a different lifetime, on a different planet. And then he’d gone and died… but he’s back now, isn’t he? He came back to her, he came back for her.
“I’ll always come back for you, sweetheart,” Ben promises her, his voice softer this time as he urges her to turn around in his arms, to search his eyes for the truth.
But she doesn’t need to, because those– those are the words she’s been waiting all her life to hear, the words she thought she’d never get to hear.
Rey throws her arms around his neck, guides his lips down to hers. “I know,” she whispers between kisses, here in this room where she’d stayed up night after night reliving their first – and almost, almost, only – kiss. “I know.”
That night, she turns her back to the wall and kisses Ben good night, and falls asleep to the promise – the knowledge – that this is how she’ll end her days for the rest of her life.